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Map Tutorial 01 - Creating a PvP Map
Welcome So you're interested in creating your very own Battleforge maps? Great! This series of tutorials will teach you how to create beautiful cool maps. It is assumed that you read the tutorials in order though they might also help if you're just looking for a specific feature. If you are interested in something special and want me to write a tutorial about it, tell me. I'm not making any promises here but I'm open for suggestions. We are going to start by creating a Player versus Player map because it doesn't require any scripting. Player versus Environment maps will be covered in a later tutorial. Getting the Editor First you need to download the Editor. In the bootstrapper of Battleforge (yes, you need Battleforge) is a tab Optional Components and in there is the Map-Editor. Check it and login to get the update, i.e. the editor. You can now use the Start Editor Button or the pluginbasededitor.exe inside your Battleforge to launch the editor. You will be asked to accept a License Agreement. Scroll down to the bottom (reading everything of course) to be able to tick the I agree checkbox and click OK. If you don't see the checkbox try enlarging the window.I believe the most important part of the license is that the maps you create using the editor are property of EA and can be put into Battleforge by them. [Would somebody who starts the editor the first time pleace insert the actual text for "I agree" and "OK"? Creating a new Map If you want to create a map based on a random generated map you can use File/New Random Map as described in the 001 - editor tutorial - first steps.pdf file found in the help ''folder inside your Battleforge folder. This tutorial however covers how to create a map from scratch. So we need to ''File/New. A window will open asking for the desired size. As this is our first map we don't want it to be too big because we want to be done fast. Let's choose 256 x 256. Navigating around your new map is easy: Use the arrow keys to move the camera and the insert/delete, home/end and page up/page down to rotate and zoom the camera. Saving Ever heard of the saying "Save early, save often"? It's true. The Editor might crash, Windows (or whatever operating system you're using) might crash, there might be a blackout, anything. You don't want your Map or anything you did to it to be lost so you save it. Select File/Save and choose My Documents/Battleforge/Map on XP or Documents/Battleforge/Map on Vista / Windows 7. Users, please verify/correct this and remove this note! You might need to create a Map folder (don't add an S at the end!) but if there isn't even a Battleforge folder you're probably in the wrong folder. Give your Map a nice name. I called mine Tutorial01. Adding Power Wells and Monuments Now we need to add at least one monument for each player so they don't loose immediately once the map is loaded. And since we are very nice guys we'll also give them some power wells. (If you are no nice guy: You can also use egoism as a reason. You want your map to be played but nobody would play a map without power wells so add them!) To add a power well we use the Power Slot Placement Tool (P). At the top of the editor there are lots of symbols representing different tools. We will get to know them in the course of these tutorials. You can also access the tools through the Tools Menu. For (almost) every tool there is a Window. You can change its settings there. To choose which well to add we need the Entity Placement Window. It can be opened through the Windows Menu or with the shortcut Shift+E. Now select a PVP Powe Slot with the desired power amount and add a couple of them to your map. Monuments or Token Slots, as they are called in the editor, are placed in a similar way. Either select the right tool, press the shortcut Ctrl+T or click on Token Slots in the Entity Placement Window, then choose TokenNormal in the Entity Placement Window and place the monuments just like the power wells. Adding Starting Points The game needs to know where to draw player start points on the map preview and where to put the camera at the beginning of the game. So we need to place Starting Points. Select Misc in the Entity Placement Window, press M or select the Misc Placement Tool. Choose Starting Point and place one at each player's start monument. Giving them to players The next step is to assign the power wells, start points and monuments to the players. First we select the monuments/power wells that will belong to player one using the selection tool '' (Q). You can hold the left mouse button to draw a rectangle around everything you want to select, hold shift add something to the selection or set the settings for every single entity. How to set the owner? Open the ''Entity Properties Window (Shift+P) and change Player Kit to pk_kit1 for player 1 and pk_kit2 for player 2. Save. Giving your map an ingame name Please refer to help/001 - editor tutorial - first steps.pdf in your Battleforge folder for information on how and where to create a description.xml to give your map a name. The required information is on page 11. I recommend reading the whole file though. It will e.g. teach you how to create a Mini Map (Camera/Create Minimap (experimental)). (PDF files can be opened with theAdobe Reader) Congratulations, you just created your first playable PVP map! Sure, it's ugly as hell, but we'll work on that in the next tutorials. To play it you'll need a second player though and most people won't want to play unfinished maps. Therefore the next tutorial will cover how to make our map into a PVE map which we can play alone along with how to make it look less ugly. Next: Map Tutorial 02 - PVE and Textures Category:Mapping Tutorials